Our society would be doomed without the soul snatchers, at first the concept alone terrified people. Yet self-preservation triumphed over conscience, as it has always done. The soul snatchers are what keep us running, but being chosen to have your soul taken really changes your perspective.

If I sacrifice myself to the snatchers, many more will live, but again self-preservation triumphs over conscience, as it has always done. So I decided to run, it was an inherent response anyway, however the snatchers don’t like losing a prey. I keep calling them snatchers, they are really resonator scientists, the soul snatcher is a magnetic resonator, and a single EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) can produce energy for the whole city. It is true that human beings are the most abundant commodity in the planet, and therefore they should be harvested, but they will not take my pulse. It has been three days now, the longest anyone has been able to run. The snatchers are relentless; they lurk in the shadows, where darkness reigns. The resonator has made them blind, and besides, anyone who kills for a living cannot be right in the head.

I must decide what I will do today; the police search all day and night. Besides, people cannot be trusted, they know who am I, they need me to survive. Deliberations are over, and I have decided to go underground, to the old metros. I should be able to catch a few rats to eat, if I’m lucky, they hate this city as much as people do. To think this city was once beautiful, now a giant disk of grey and black metal, hovering above the slums, where conditions are even worse than in the subway. And on the centre is the resonator, a tower of twisted metals that stands as a monolith to survival, and the sacrifices needed to survive.

What has survival done for us anyway? Most people in this city would be better off dead. We don’t even know if we are the only ones left after the war. The resonator blocks every broadcast we try to send, we don’t know if there is anyone left on the damn planet. And yet we hold on to life, what a terrible price to pay for survival, being alone. You must be wondering, why don’t they just find another victim to feed the iron monster with souls? Only a few ones are compatible with the tower, we are all scanned at birth, I was born to die. I try to sleep, but my eyes won’t close, too much pain, too much anguish. Soon the last of humanity will be no more, and come to think of it, what humanity is left in us, who live from air purifiers and other’s souls. A window has opened in my mind, I step out into the tainted sun, and suddenly the snatchers surround me under the beast’s shadow. They are thin and decaying, as disgusting as they are, is the thought that they are human that sickens me the most. I am tied to the resonator, to the beast of red and black to whom we owe our survival, though tainted, survival after all.

The snatchers are activating the resonator, no one would harm the beast, there is no need of security, and now I can see, conscience triumphing over self-preservation, death to us all. I feel the beast’s electric claws trying to pry my soul from my body, the countdown ends, and I pull the main wire with all my strength. The countdown is over, and we are free. The beast shrieks with agony as the disk collapses into the slums, under the monsters weight. The nonhuman snatchers despair, and my soul dissipates and I go blind in fire and death. With the last of my strength I yell; “Rejoice for I have set you free! For tainted survival is no survival at all! For the last of humanity dies today!!”

And although I was cold, I was happy.